Αporia

Monday, December 11, 2017

The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies will organize a summer school from July 29 to August 3, 2018 in Hamburg. The topic will be “Sceptical Strategies, Methods, and Approaches in the Middle Ages: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions.” The Summer School is intended for MA students and PhD candidates from the Humanities. Depending on capacity, BA students in their last year of studies may be accepted. Up to 15 fully-funded scholarships (travel and accommodation) are available. For complete information, go here.

Thursday, November 23, 2017

I've just found about this monograph by Tomoji Shogenji that makes use of Bayesian reasoning to (allegedly) defeat Cartesian skepticism: Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism: In Defense of Belief in the Natural World (Routledge). Click here for more information.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

On November 23rd, from 5 pm to 7 pm, Rico Gutschmidt will give the talk “Illusion or Insight? Skepticism and the External Standpoint” at the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF), in Buenos Aires. For more information, click here.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

On November 14-16, the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies (Hamburg) will host the workshop “Buddhism and Scepticism: Historical, Philosophical, and Comparative Perspectives.” For more information, go here.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

On October 15th, Oswaldo Porchat Pereira passed away. This is very sad news particularly for the Brazilian philosophical community. Porchat pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in philosophy at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), obtaining a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Aristotle’s conception of science. He spent research periods in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. He was the founder of both the philosophy department and the Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). He considered himself a skeptic and devoted his work almost exclusively to discussing Sextus Empiricus's Pyrrhonism. His teaching and writings exerted a strong influence on his students (e.g., Plínio Junqueira Smith, Luiz Eva, Otávio Bueno, Roberto Bolzani), to the extent that several of them devoted their own work to the study of skepticism, creating in Brazil a relatively large community of academics interested in that philosophical movement. At the time of his death, he was emeritus professor at USP. I met him once in 2014, in São Paulo, when I gave a talk about his neo-Pyrrhonism, which is expounded in a series of papers collected in Rumo ao Ceticismo (Editora UNESP, 2007). It is quite hard to determine exactly what his skeptical stance consists in, but as he told me then, he always took his latest paper to be the true expression of his thought and was largely unconcerned with whether it was consistent with the ideas expounded in his previous writings. He seemed to be a gentle person.

Friday, October 13, 2017

Giuseppe Veltri (Hamburg) will give the lecture “Negotiating the Principle of (Non)-Contradiction: Johann Frischmuth (1619-1687) on the Rabbinic Sceptic Dialectic” both at Johns Hopkins University (October 24th) and at Princeton University (October 25th). For more information, click here and here, respectively.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

On October 16th, Giuseppe Veltri (Hamburg) will give the lecture, “Ancient Skepticism: Strategies of a Philosophical Movement,” at the American University in Bulgaria. You can find more information here.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

On October 13-15, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (Canada) will host the conference “Scepticisme, rhétorique et politique à l'âge classique.” You can read the program by going here or by clicking on the images below.